Last Thursday, 24th October, saw the launch of my text, The Black Path, as part of the London Adventures series at The Broadway Bookshop published by Three Imposters. It was a perfect place for the launch sat right on the course of the Black Path in Broadway Market, Hackney. I’d walked this ancient drovers path back in January for a YouTube video, and writing this publication gave me an opportunity to dig deeper in the rich history of this storied thoroughfare that runs from Walthamstow to Shoreditch, and then along Old Street to Smithfield.
With the Three Imposters before the launch outside the Pie & Mash shop mentioned in the booklet (now an opticiansSt Leonards Church Shoreditch at the start of a walk along the Black Path to Broadway Bookshop
The Black Path is published by Three Imposters as part of the London Adventures series.
The shades of long-dead writers in the London streets, random meetings, quests and journeys striking lines across the city, the past seeping through the pavements, the unexpected erupting through the fabric of everyday life, glimpses of the fantastic in the ordinary: London Adventures can be any or all of these. John Rogers’ contribution to the series is a psychogeographical ramble along the Black Path, an old drovers and porters road from Walthamstow to the markets in the City, featuring pie and mash shops and pubs, Francesca’s Cafe and the Battle of Broadway Market, the London bodysnatchers, the violent origins of Haggerston Park and much, much more from the colourful history of an ancient route. Previous writers in the series include Iain Sinclair and Xiaolu Guo. Limited numbered edition of 250 copies. Price £10.00 Published by Three Impostors
London Adventures launch London Welsh Centre 29th March 2023
In February 1957 (On the Road was published in September 1957) Jack Kerouac boarded a ship from Brooklyn to Tangier in Morocco. He traveled back to the U.S via France and England. An account of this trip was published in Lonesome Traveler. Below is his record of his few days in London waiting to catch the boat train to Southampton.
“Outskirts of the city in late afternoon like the old dream of sun rays through afternoon trees. – Out at Victoria Station, where some of the students were met by limousines. – Pack on back, excited, I started walking in the gathering dusk down Buck-ingham Palace Road seeing for the first time long deserted streets. (Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.) – Past the Palace, down the Mall through St James’s Park, to the Strand, traffic and fumes and shabby English crowds going out to movies, Trafalgar Square, on to Fleet Street where there was less traffic and dimmer pubs and sad side alleys, almost clear to St Paul’s Cathedral where it got too Johnsonianly sad. – So I turned back, tired, and went into the King Lud pub for a sixpenny Welsh rarebit and a stout.
Site of the King Lud pub on Ludgate Circus
I called my London agent on the phone, telling him my plight. ‘My dear fellow it’s awfully unfortunate I wasnt in this afternoon. We were visiting mother in Yorkshire. Would a fiver help you?* ‘Yes!’ So I took a bus to his smart flat at Buckingham Gate (I had walked right past it after getting off the train) and went up to meet the dignified old couple. – He with goatee and fireplace and Scotch to offer me, telling me about his one-hundred-year-old mother reading all of Trevelyan’s English Social History. – Homburg, gloves, umbrella, all on the table, attesting to his way of living, and myself feeling like an American hero in an old movie. — Far cry from the little kid under a river bridge dreaming of England. – They fed me sandwiches, gave me money, and then I walked around London savoring the fog in Chelsea, the bobbies wandering in the milky mist, thinking, Who will strangle the bobby in the fog?’ The dim lights, the English soldier strolling with one arm around his girl and with the other hand eating fish and chips, the honk of cabs and buses, Piccadilly at midnight and a bunch of Teddy Boys asking me if I knew Gerry Mulligan.
Finally I got a fifteen-bob room in the Mapleton Hotel (in the attic) and had a long divine sleep with the window open, in the morning the carillons blowing all of an hour round eleven and the maid bringing in a tray of toast, butter, marmalade, hot milk and a pot of coffee as I lay there amazed. And on Good Friday afternoon a heavenly performance of the St Matthew Passion by the St Paul’s choir, with full orchestra and a special service choir. – I cried most of the time and saw a vision of an angel in my mother’s kitchen and longed to go home to sweet America again. – And realized that it didnt matter that we sin, that my father died only of impatience, that all my own petty gripes didnt matter either. – Holy Bach spoke to me and in front of me was a magnificent marble basrelief showing Christ and three Roman soldiers listening: ‘And he spake unto them do violence to no man, nor accuse any falsely, and be content with thy wages. Outside as I walked in the dusk around Christopher Wren’s great masterpiece and saw the gloomy overgrown ruins of Hitler’s blitz around the cathedral, I saw my own mission. In the British Museum I looked up my family in Rivista Araldica, IV, Page 240, Lebris de Keroack. Canada, originally from Brittany. Blue on a stripe of gold with three silver nails. Motto: Love, work and suffer.’ I could have known. At the last moment I discovered the Old Vic while waiting for my boat train to Southampton. – The performance was Antony and Cleopatra. – It was a marvelously smooth and beautiful performance, Cleopatra’s words and sobbings more beautiful than music, Enobarbus noble and strong, Lepidus wry and funny at the druken rout on Pompey’s boat, Pompey warlike and harsh, Antony virile, Caesar sinister, and though the cultured voices criticized the Cleopatra in the lobby at intermission, I knew that I had seen Shakespeare as it should be played. On the train en route to Southampton, brain trees growing out of Shakespeare’s fields, and the dreaming meadows full of lamb dots.”
Writing starts with a photograph, W.G Sebald said on a German TV arts magazine programme about the publication of his book The Emigrants. This clip was played under the looming 15th Century timbered roof of the Dragon Hall in Norwich on Wednesday at the launch of Shadows of Reality – A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials (Eds. Clive Scott & Nick Warr). The event also marked what would have been Sebald’s 80th birthday, in the city where he worked for much of his life and made his home. I decided to make the trip to Norwich to attend the event, meeting a friend there who had been taught German literature by ‘Max’ Sebald at UEA in the 1980’s. My walk from the station to meet Duncan passed through the Art Nouveau Royal Arcade, built in 1899. Such arcades are intimately connected with strolling poets, flâneurs, through an association with Baudelaire and described at length by German philosopher and theorist Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project. Sebald was himself a notable strolling poet and would have passed through the Royal Arcade on many occasions.
Swan Yard
Duncan and I looped round the narrow medieval streets of Norwich in the hours before the event at the National Centre for Writing at Dragon Hall. Along with a group of Sebald’s former students, Duncan had reprised the Austerlitz walk from Liverpool Street to Alderney Road in Stepney that I’d filmed with artist Bob and Roberta Smith in 2019 using notes provided by Iain Sinclair, who’d been taken on the walk by poet Stephen Watts. It was Watts who’d led W.G Sebald on those original Austerlitz research walks through the East End. The UEA alumni walk of Max’s former students was carried out on the 18th May 2024, the day that would’ve been Sebald’s 80th birthday. There’s an account of the walk on the University of East Anglia website, where W.G Sebald taught for thirty years.
With still some time to kill we admired the exterior of the Music House in King Street, the oldest house in Norwich, built in the 12th Century.
As a writer of unclassifiable prose, Sebald drew heavily on photographic images and was notable for embedding them within the text in intriguing ways. The Shadows of Reality book collects Sebald’s photographic materials together into a single catalogue with commentary and presented in chronological order. Friends and former colleagues read from Sebald’s works, often in German – the language Sebald wrote in. The conclusion to the evening was its most impactful. An audio recording of W.G Sebald reading from the Emigrants in English at an event at UEA in the 90s that reverberated around the packed medieval hall. It was a poignant and magical event.
I’m delighted to be celebrating Dalloway Day at the brilliant Hatchards Piccadilly on 22nd June 2024. I’ll be in conversation with writer Matthew Beaumont “to reflect on walking in London both in Mrs Dalloway’s 1920s and today.”
“In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.” Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Here’s the full unedited video of my wonderful conversation with Iain Sinclair at Hatchards Piccadilly on 25th January. The event was to discuss my new book, Welcome to New London – journeys and encounters in the post-Olympic city but we wandered as we’re wont to do and even had a chat about Iain’s latest book Pariah Genius.
Buy Welcome to New London: journeys and encounters in the post-Olympic city from Hatchards here
Iain Sinclair’s new book Pariah Geniusis published on 25th April 2024
Some of the enticing titles embossed on old cloth spines on the South Bank book market outside the BFI. Browsing these tables brings back great memories of my NFT days – book collecting chats back in the box office, trawling for treasure and knowledge. The excitement of the hunt. My hasty steps ground to a halt and I’m drawn into another dimension of time.
